Artivist Childhoods

The rise in the number of young people disengaged from mainstream schooling is reaching critical proportions. This paper explores a child-framed participatory inquiry known as The Walking A/r/tography Project, which sought to challenge, empower and engage youth at risk in one Special Assistance Secondary School in Southeast Queensland through a/r/tographic mappings of place and subsequent critical and creative experiences in the classroom studio. The young people were invited to the project as researchers, who collected, generated and analysed data, resulting in agentic activist positionings. Extensive literature supports the benefits of an Arts-rich environment, which can enable impactful social justice learnings and a deep awareness of social and political activism, particularly when they are experienced through contemporary artworks and artmaking practices. Such experiences and knowings can tie learning in, through and with the Arts directly to educational activism, where student voice and agency are foregrounded for the purposes of empowerment and disruptive, transformational learning. The findings of this study assert that young people at risk can co-create and reimagine their educational experiences to engage in schooling more positively as Artivists.